Telstra this week urged mobile operators in the Asia-Pacific region to work more closely with governments and regulators to gain access to the spectrum they need to support ever-increasing usage.
"[This is] a call to arms for operators in the region," Mike Wright, executive director at Telstra, told attendees at CommunicAsia on Wednesday.
Regulators say they don’t hear a lot from the operator community, Wright said, but the system works best when the telcos engage with regulators and governments.
"Be part of the discussion," ahead of the 2015 World Radio Communication Conference (WRC-15) in November, Wright said.
In some ways, the Asia-Pacific region is leading the world when it comes to spectrum policy. Its Asia Pacific Telecommunity 700 MHz (APT700) band plan is gaining momentum within the region and in Latin America.
The standardisation of the 700 MHz band was a "brilliant piece of work," Wright said, describing it as "a feather in the cap of the Asia-Pacific region."
However, we need to see more markets in the Asia-Pacific using APT700, Wright said.
It will become "the most popular 4G spectrum band bar none," he predicted, exceeding the 1800 MHz band, which is currently the most widely used globally.
According to the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), there were 176 LTE network rollouts in the 1800 MHz band earlier this year, or 45% of the global total. 10 operators have commercially launched LTE using APT700, the firm said.
"[700 MHz] will be the workhorse spectrum carrying traffic" for the next 10 years, Wright said.
